Science: On to the South Pole

While whistles, bells and yells made farewell din in the narrow harbor of Dunedin, New Zealand, last week, Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd's South Pole Expedition started from that port for a year and a half in Antarctica. He, his scientists and able seamen were aboard the bark City of New York. There was no breeze flirting down Dunedin's forested mountains to tap-tap her sails; so her mateship the steamer Eleanor Boiling hauled her down the narrow Otago Inlet like a puffing rustic leading his wench through a lane.

Behind her at Dunedin she left another Byrd ship, the Eleanor Boiling. She is to follow the City of New York about Christmas time, when the Antarctic ice is mushy from its summer's heat.

The City of New York is carrying airplanes, two portable houses, scientific baggage, and a season's supply of provender. Commander Byrd will set up his base on the Bay of Wales, across the Antarctic Continent from Deception Island (among the South Shetlands), where Explorer Sir George Hubert Wilkins, a fortnight ago, made tests for his South Polar flight (TIME, Dec. 3). The Wilkins Expedition is rather a tour de force, another example of intrepidity. Of necessity a swift affair, its scientific observations can be only bird's-eye.

The Byrd Expedition during its 18 months on the continent will make thorough explorations within the range of its two planes and of its several dog teams.

Reaching the two-mile high elevation of the South Pole is only an incidental goal. Amundsen was there in December 1911; Scott in January 1912. Shackleton almost got there in January 1909. All three, like Commander Byrd, approached through the Ross Sea, the deep bite into the Asiatic side of Antarctica. Explorer Wilkins is trying from the American side. His distance, from Deception Island, to the Pole is approximately 1,900 miles (air way). That is about the same as the distance ships must go between Galveston and Manhattan, Baltimore and the Barbados.

Explorer Byrd, at Dunedin, last week,, was 3,000 miles from the South Pole. That does not seem far. Yet Portland, Ore., and Millinocket, Me., are 3,000 miles from the North Pole; so too Lyons, France, and Venice, Italy.

Three thousand miles is the ship or train distance between San Diego, Calif., and Guayaquil, Ecuador (where President-Elect Hoover was last week, see p. 10), between Manhattan and Queenstown, Ireland, between Washington and San Francisco. Trains or ships join those traveled places in a few days. Getting to the trackless Poles takes months.